…Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. There burns a truer light of God in them…

- Robert Browning (The Faultless Painter)

These may have been the rambling words of lament of a French painter turned fugitive who probably missed his true calling. Yet, few phrases have had such an impact on art, culture and even architecture as the one, “Less is more.” While it has caught the imagination and brought out the creative best in architects, musicians and designers alike, ‘less is more’ as a philosophy of life has been around for centuries. Remember the simpler days when we had fewer choices, fewer things and life was a lot easier?

Why do we need more? And more of what? Why sometimes we tend to value balance, while otherwise we tend to lean towards one of the ends? And, most of all, why sometimes less is good?

The following list is my answer to the last question. And, being a list about less, I will skip every unneeded clutter and just start it away (it won’t take you more than 10 minutes to read the whole article):

1. Less Money in Your Life Will Push You To Value More Everything Else

The money rat race is a never ending game. The moremoneyyou get the more money you want. It’s a thrill in many ways similar to the one you get by putting your fingers in a power outlet. You get an amazing experience but at the same time you slowly decrease your overall resistance and health. Next time you’ll need more because you created a little bit of tolerance to it. And then a little bit more. And so on.

Money is just raw energy. Without a goal to direct it, without a plan to make it something material, it will remain in its raw form. And every form of raw energy is a dangerous thing to play with.

Now, imagine you won’t aim for this raw energy all the time. Imagine you aim for something simpler. Climbing on top of the world for instance. Or having a balanced family and raising kids. Or writing a fantastic story, painting or sculpting. All in all, just getting out your creative potential. The less money you’ll aim for, the more you’ll want to put your creative potential to work.

Less is more: less money is more creativity.

2. Less Negative Thoughts Will Make Room For More Positive Thoughts

Now that’s an easy one. It works out of the box and everybody could understand it at the first glance. Just eliminate thenegative thoughtsand you’ll make room for some more positive thoughts. Alas, it’s not always like this. The problem is we’re having different understanding of the concept “negative thoughts”. What I perceive as a negative thought may be something natural for somebody else. Negative thoughts are highly personal. They are shaped by our life experience, upbringing, current environment and more.

So, how can you identify those negative thoughts in the first place? My number one trick in doing that is: are they making me feel angry? Am I experiencing feelings of fear and abandonment? If yes, that’s a negative thought. No matter how “right” that thought may look like in my own internal values system, if it triggers feelings of anger, revenge or fear, it’s a negative thought.

Less is more: less fear, anger and revenge will definitely make room for something else. And that something else has no chance left but being something good. We already got rid of the bad stuff, right?

3. Less Fights Means More Time for Understanding Yourself

Fighting is a constant activity in our modern society. We’re doing it almost on autopilot. Every time we’re not heard, every time something is not working according to our own expectations, every time somebody is making us feeling bad, we’re starting to fight. Most of the time, we’re doing it on the inside. We’re arguing, we’re playing our case, even if we don’t say it out loud.

We’re getting better and better at that. I know I won thousands of fights on the inside: I knew I was right. But in the end, it doesn’t really matters who is winning a fight. All that matters is that you’re using your resources in something useless. You’re spending time and energy on something irrelevant. Ok, it’s in the past now. Move on.

Fighting is such a waste of time. Just make this simple exercise of writing down every argument you had in your mind (or out loud, if you’re more extrovert) and be amazed about how much time you’re spending on this. Now imagine how it would be to make this time available for something really important, like understandingyourself.

4. Less Compromise Means More Power for Your Own Decisions

Compromise is a good social tool. It was invented to keep some sort of a balance between different opinions and create a middle path, allegedly a safer one. As such, compromise is a useful tool for survival. But as with any other good thing in our lives, overusing compromise made it toxic. We compromise on almost everything.

When was the last time you gave full power to your decisions? When was the last time you took into account your own desires and goals, without getting infected by external intentions? If you live in a modern society, you did this last time when you were a kid. And I bet it wasn’t very well received, either.

Less compromise will bring back color and shape into yourlife. It may not be the color and shape you would expect, but it would be your color and your shape. You can start modifying that world, once you get a hook on it. But without shrinking compromise to the size it deserves (a last minute survival resort) you won’t be able to get a grasp on the correct world. You’ll work on an infected vision of it.

5. Less Procrastination Will Push You to Get More Done

I bet you didn’t know that, by even procrastination can be done in aproductive way. Joke aside, spending time without doing what you are committed to do is such a waste. Procrastination is the bigger client of our modern time expenditures. We spend more time procrastinating than maybe sleeping.

Imagine how it would be to have less of procrastination in your life. Less time spent on nothing. Naturally, you’ll start doing things. You’ll start making the world spin again. Staring at something (a project, a task, a client) without acting on it will make it stop. It won’t move, it will be dead. Procrastination is just a softer way to slowly kill your time (in both senses).

6 Less Something Is Always More of The Opposite

And with that, we’re getting to the core of it. Less something is always more of the opposite. That’s the fundamental principle of quantity and it’s a basic rule of our perceived Universe. Some of you may think that’s just a normal fact and I emphasis a normal fact too much. It’s simple, everybody knows that less of something is more of the opposite. Well, for those of you who are really getting this, I apologize. You’re not into the target of this article.

But if there are some readers who think that less of something could really trigger more of the opposite, and that is an incredible powerful tool for switching our world, our life, our universe upside down the way we need it, the last item on the list is for you.

7. Less of This Blog Post Means More Time for Your Brain to Ponder Things by Itself

That’s right, I could go like this forever. But I won’t. I think it’s far more better for you (intentional grammatical error) to let you think things by yourself now. If you mentally allocated 10 minutes to this blog post, be happy: you only spent 5 so far, so the remaining 5 are going to be used for somebody really special: you.

What about its political ramifications?

All the best for your mid-term, remember less is more, so just chill......:)